The Perfection: blend of gore and romance

Being a romantic horror, ‘The Perfection’ will not be everyone’s cup of tea but what director Richard Shepard pulled off here is entirely different than generic expectations.

With a span of roughly 90 minutes the ‘Netflix’ movie quickly keeps changing its colors and hiding its motives to spiral down to a crazy finishing. Gut-wrenching horror and witty one-liners go hand in hand here.

Starting somewhat dramatic, the film is a tale of two musical prodigies in Cello, Charlotte (Allison Williams) who is replaced by Lizzie (Logan Browning) as the best student of the institute run by Anton (Steven Weber) and Paloma (Alaina Huffman).

Following Charlotte and Lizzie’s meet in Shanghai selecting next ‘student’ for Anton Charlotte seems threatened but aroused by the younger prodigy. After an electrifying cello duet, the pair grows even ‘closer’.

Next morning, the two young women decide to take a day trip through the Chinese countryside, even though Lizzie is hungover and sick. Her illness escalates as time passes and an uncomfortable, nauseating and horrifying situation builds up around this particular ‘sickness’. The horror depicted here better left unsaid and the twisted end of the trip too.

This quick transition of mood and swapping character perception gives the film an upper-hand over traditional gorefest movies. The precision of the tight screenplay, written by the director with Eric C. Charmelo and Nicole Snyder, means every string left unexplained in the first half are elementary for grasping the plot.

Allison Williams’ portrayal resembles her tight-lipped character driven act of “Get Out”. Logan Browning compliments her with a scary vulnerability to the role of Lizzie which later comes round as strength. The second half of the film sees an incredible performance by Steven Weber as the ‘nutty’ teacher searching for the ‘perfect’ student.

Some of the shots taken might seem too dark for the audience but that should not bother the appropriate viewers who love the genre. Aside from a few avoidable spoon-feeding, Richard’s execution of the script is unsteadily cheap at times like traditional sound effects of doors and close-ups of the knife and few more. Brush that aside and the movie is still enjoyable to those who are in search for some late night horrors but won’t mind a melodramatic wrapper around it. For which Rotten tomatoes vouches with an 85% ‘fresh’ score.

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